Wickham column: U.S.-China cyber war continues

Fresh from publicly defending his own administration's cyberspace hanky-panky, President Obama challenged Chinese President Xi Jinping to rein in China's unacknowledged misuse of the Internet to steal some of this country's most important economic and military secrets.

Doing something about cyberespionage is "at the center of the relationship" between the world's two leading superpowers, national security adviser Tom Donilon told reporters last week during a two-day summit between the U.S. and Chinese leaders in the California desert town of Rancho Mirage.

The Obama administration has accused China of pilfering billions of dollars worth of technical and financial data - and untold numbers of American military secrets. It is widely believed that this sophisticated Internet hacking attack is being run by the Chinese military.

That knock plays well in this country. In advance of the summit, corporate leaders and politicians of both parties urged Obama to get tough with Xi during his face-to-face meetings with the Chinese leader. Ending China's cyberspying on the U.S. is a top priority of the Obama administration, presidential spokesman Jay Carney said last month.

But in China, it is this country that is portrayed as the cyber-attack villain. Last month, China's state newspaper, the People's Daily, accused the U.S. of being the real "hacking empire" with a 50,000-member "cyber army." China claims it is a victim of cyber theft - and accuses the U.S. of being the biggest culprit in such attacks.

The truth, I'm sure both Obama and Xi know, is that China and the U.S. both have massive intelligence operations trained on each other. It would be a gross act of nonfeasance for Obama not to direct a significant portion of his administration's Internet sleuthing capabilities on China, which is a growing threat to this nation's world dominance.

Already one of America's biggest trading partners, China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt. China is also Africa's biggest trading partner - an economic position the U.S. once enjoyed. And it is the top trading partner of Brazil, South America's largest country.

It wasn't long ago that the U.S. was the world's undisputed economic powerhouse. But during the past decade, China has grown from the world's sixth to second largest economy. Back in 2004, the U.S. had a gross domestic product of $11.9 trillion to China's $1.9 trillion. This year, the U.S. GDP is $16.2 trillion, an increase of 36 percent from 2004. During the same period, China's GDP increased by nearly 374 percent to $9 trillion.

With a shooting war largely out of the question for two nuclear powers with sane leadership, the struggle for global hegemony between the U.S. and China has been reduced to an economic struggle. While the two countries have engaged in some military muscle flexing, most of it has happened along the Pacific Rim and the South China Sea. That chest-beating by the U.S. and China is aimed largely at building strategic alliances and securing economic advantage among countries in those regions.

In this competition, the military and economic interests of China and the U.S. are conjoined - which makes the use of cyberattacks as much a strategy for victory as a well-executed flanking movement was for Gen. George Patton's tank corps during the Battle of the Bulge.

In explaining his administration's decision to engage in a limited surveillance of the telephone and Internet activities of Americans, Obama said domestic cybersnooping is necessary to keep Americans safe from attack. While the president's defense of this program of "modest encroachments" of personal privacy has surprised many Americans, the global cyberspace war being waged between the U.S. and China should not.

The winner could well dominate this planet for decades.

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Wickham column: U.S.-China cyber war continues

Fresh from publicly defending his own administration's cyberspace hanky-panky, President Obama challenged Chinese President Xi Jinping to rein in China's unacknowledged misuse of the Internet to

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